Family

Blood is a strange thing. Family bonds aren't like the ones of friendship or lovers. They can't be shattered by drama, or anger, or distance, or time, or even years silence. They're unbreakable, and they stretch over quarrels and oceans and generations. Maybe this explains why, being here in a place I've never lived with people I've never really known, I somehow still feel at home. I've never come face to face with my heritage in any significant way before, and the names of the people who made it up had always seemed distant and superfluous to me. Maybe that's why it's a remote concept to my mind that I'm being accepted here not because of who I am or where I'm going, but because of where I come from.

When I was a child and my parents would speak to me vaguely of the past, I always thought of the people they mentioned as I thought of the characters they invented in their bed-time stories. They were as real to me back then as the people in the books I read. It occurs to me now that that notion of thinking followed me right into my teens. Over the past week I've been compelled to change that outlook. My relatives are no longer these intangible leaves on some distant branch of a metaphorical family tree. They're real people who are right in front of me playing a harmonica, cooking up fish cakes, reminiscing with each other in loud voices about swimming spots and long gone pets, and complaining about gas prices. People who's faces I look into and see my mother's nose, my sisters grin and the color of my eyes. I am part of a thousand stories I didn't know existed.

My dad told me once that one of the most important things in the world is knowing where you come from. I think I'm closer to that now than I ever have been.